"Best Reissue of 1994"
- Rolling
Stone - January 1995
"Jimi Hendrix :Woodstock...includes
an essay by Hendrix scholar Michael Fairchild, who rhapsodizes that
Hendrix made his guitar sound like 'jet engine orgasms.'"
- Los Angeles
Times - June 21, 1994
"Liner notes are by Michael Fairchild of
Rochester, a veritable walking archive of Hendrix lore."
-
Democrat & Chronicle - August 7,
1994
"In honor of the 25th anniversary of the Woodstock
Music and Art Fair, MCA Records announced this week the release of Jimi
Hendrix :Woodstock, a musical celebration of Hendrix's famous
head-lining appearance at the Aquarian Age's ultimate music festival.
The release includes a 28-page booklet with an extensive
behind-the-scenes Woodstock history written by Hendrix scholar Michael
Fairchild, author of A Touch Of Hendrix. On the
then-new tune, Izabella, Hendrix debuts the
Univibe, a new electronic device that, in Fairchild's words, 'makes his
guitar sound like jet engine or orgasms.' The band closes with an
etheral A-minor masterpiece known as Villanova Junction Blues,
'Like a butterfly floating to a halt,' Fairchild concludes, 'this
serene prayer returns the audience to their futures.' Hendrix's
technique was so revolutionary that many of the things he did 25 years
ago remain a mystery to this day."
- Sacramento
Observer - July 27, 1994
"Jimi Hendrix is arguably the greatest electic
guitarist who has ever lived. You won't get any argument from local
Hendrix historian, Michael Fairchild. He's a paid consultant on MCA's
new Jimi Hendrix :Woodstock CD and home video. And
take a look at what Fairchild's doing at Woodstock this weekend: The Jimi
Hendrix Exhibition is a multi-media tribute to the
rock legend, and, since it was Michael Fairchild's idea, he'll
accompany it this weekend. The Exhibition has been touring the country
for about a year now and it's part of Woodstock '94's free 6-acre 'Mind
Expansion Village.'"
- R-News TV,
Rochester, NY - August 11, 1994
"MCA released ':Woodstock' in
1994, and 'Live at Woodstock' in 1999. :Woodstock
(1994) was one of the crown jewels of the Alan Douglas regime, a
masterpiece of compression…The booklets that came with the releases are
the area on which I want to focus. The :Woodstock
(1994) booklet features an essay by Michael Fairchild. The more current
essay (1999) was written by a man named David Fricke, a name I have
never seen in association with Jimi Hendrix's music. These two essays
approach the Woodstock show in completely different ways.
"Before I begin to discuss the content of Fricke's
essay, I want to mention a couple of typographical errors….So what if
there's a word missing here or there? So what if David Fricke doesn't
know what a serial comma is, right? So what if some of his longer
paragraphs are actually one sentence? Why do these things matter? They
matter because they are indicative of an overall attitude: an attitude
of ignoring details within the essay…is Fricke saying that the
Woodstock performance of Beginnings was never
released in complete form until 1999?...the 1994 MCA release of the
same concert includes the complete version of Beginnings.
"Grammar and punctuation are not two of Jane
[Fujita] [producer of Live at Woodstock] areas of
expertise. I do think it's funny to see everyone thanked with a picture
of garbage as the visual backdrop for the text…The Live at
Woodstock booklet is full of the same old tired euphemisms,
the same old statements about the "Star Spangled Banner,"
the same old insights that are about as insightful as the
religiously-themed thank-you notes on the last page. Michael
Fairchild's essay on Hendrix at Woodstock is much more interesting than
Fricke's essay. Perhaps the most revealing difference between the two
essays is the frequency with which the authors quote Hendrix himself.
There are 18 Hendrix quotes in the Fairchild essay; Fricke quotes
Hendrix in his essay only two times…Fairchild also quoted the event
organizers, the people who worked at the scene, and other musicians who
performed at Woodstock. Fricke's only lengthy quote comes from a man
who was neither at Woodstock nor old enough to remember it. There are
no bibliographical notes in the Live at Woodstock
booklet, no real suggestions for further reading. Is David Fricke worth
reading at all?...I am disturbed by this decision to sacrifice honesty
and accuracy in the name of poorly-written prose."
- Alex Thayer in
Seattle - Internet Review - 1999
[NOTE: Paul
Allen and Jane Fujita replaced Michael Fairchild's
"Woodstock Hurricane Story"
with the "uninteresting" and "same old tired euphemisms" junk by Mr.
Fricke that Mr. Thayer notes above. Allen and Fujita's "new" Hendrix
company aims to dumb-down Jimi's legacy and promote their "releases" to
a tiny crowd of non-thinking collectors and guitar greasers. Most of
the products they put out are purchased by "billionaire" Paul Allen's
organization to make it appear that a significant number of people are
interested. Their main concern is to persuade media everywhere to
follow their example and conceal all insights from Michael Fairchild.
The booklet stories they have replaced Michael's insights with are
totally insignificant, they are intentionally uninteresting and
designed to be mere filler in the packaging. Their aim is to snuff out
all connections that Jimi's story naturally has with universal concerns
and instead promote embarrassing superficiality, while simultaneously
hiding Michael's insights.
- James Sedgewick]
Woodstock
Diary CD, booklet by Michael Fairchild,
on Atlantic Records 1994.
"Hendrix's words and
music are being kept alive by a man who is known all over the world as
one of the top authorities on Hendrix; Michael Fairchild. Fairchild is
working on a CD called
On The Road, it will be a
double CD of the best of the unreleased live concert music and is due
out in September. He has also compiled a manuscript entitled
Rock
Prophecy, which contains quotes from every source available
concerning the non-musical side of Hendrix. 'I want to take the concept
of
Rock Prophecy and introduce it to people who
don't know anything about the music of Hendrix and show how it pertains
to religion and American history. Jimi had a vision and was trying to
communicate it to the world'...Fairchild was also involved with the
release of
Woodstock Diary (Atlantic Records -
August 1994) [see right], a compilation of songs that did not appear on
the original soundtrack for Woodstock."
- BackFlash
Magazine - August 1995
Dominator
Blues - A report on the 2003 PBS program,
The
Blues, produced by Paul Allen, which like his 2001
Evolution
program, and
Deep
Impact movie, continues this Microsoft founder's
obsession with producing low-brow rebuttals to
Rock Prophecy.
Dominator Blues links to the original
booklet text for the 1994 MCA release of the
Jimi
Hendrix :Blues CD, which, in a fit of jealousy, Mr.
Allen had banned from the market.
Rock
Prophecy vs. Evolution - A report on the 2001 PBS
program produced by Paul Allen, his convoluted attempt to "answer" the
concepts in
Rock Prophecy.
Jimi
Code vs. Da Vinci Code -
Da Vinci Code
contains dozens of sections that overlap (some are near word-for-word)
with
Rock Prophecy.
- James Sedgwick]
.
